A new analysis of genetic studies proposes that the cognitive capacity for language was already present at least 135,000 years ago.

Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite ...

Forget Survival Of The Fittest. Humans Conquered Our Planet By Sharing Ideas. In A Nutshell Humans spread across nearly every habitat on Earth in around 300,000 years, a feat that biology alone would ...

John Gowlett receives funding from PAST Africa and Wenner-Gren Foundation, and his work has previously been supported by The Leverhulme Trust. He is associated with a new series of podcasts on human ...

My son is a wizard. He walks into the kitchen, looks at me and utters the magic words: “Can I have a cheese and tomato sandwich, please?” A few minutes later, just such a snack appears in front of him ...

The bones of our ancestors remain silent. So, how can we possibly imagine what our earliest languages sounded like? Paleoanthropologists study millions of years of fossil evidence to try and ...

The mystery of the origin of human language has captivated scientists for centuries, and it remains one of the most intriguing problems in the field. How did humans manage to progress from simple ...

Language is one of the few faculties that still seems to be uniquely human. Other animals, like chimpanzees and songbirds, have developed elaborate communication systems, but none appears to convey ...

A newborn cannot speak, read, or walk. Yet moments after entering the world, the infant brain already responds to rhythm and ...